Monday, September 24, 2018

Finders, Keepers, Losers, Trump

by Michael C. Dorf
Last week, while in North Carolina surveying some of the damage caused by Florence, the president came across a property on which a yacht had washed ashore during the storm. According to the NY Times story:

“Is this your boat?” Mr. Trump asked the homeowner.

When the man shook his head and said “No,” the president turned with a grin and replied, “At least you got a nice boat out of the deal.”

This was, admittedly, not an important moment in the Trump presidency, but it is a reminder that the man whose principal claim to power is business acumen has no idea how a system of capitalism actually works. Nor does he have any sense of justice in a regime of private property.

Let's begin with the law. Ownership of a vessel in navigable waters is generally governed by federal admiralty law, which is admittedly complex, with common law rules and statutes, distinctions between the law of salvage and the law of finds, and many more nuances. But under no circumstances does the owner of a ship lose title to that ship just because it washes ashore in a storm. Yes, there are circumstances in which a finder or salvager can make a claim to an abandoned ship, but where the owner of a ship can be readily identified through reasonable effort, the owner retains title. At most, the finder may be entitled to compensation for measures taken to preserve the ship.

Indeed, those aren't principles that are in any way special to admiralty or maritime jurisdiction. They are features of North Carolina law for ordinary property also. In North Carolina, one who comes into possession of lost property is not entitled to keep it and indeed can be found guilty of feloniously receiving stolen property if he or she "knows or has reasonable means of knowing or ascertaining the owner," but does not make an attempt to contact the owner and simply keeps it.

How could anyone--much less the president--think that simply finding property entitles one to keep it? If you find a wallet on the sidewalk or at a restaurant, the law doesn't just permit you to keep the wallet or the cash in it.

But perhaps I'm being uncharitable. After all, the president appears to have believed that ownership of the boat was unknown. He said: "They don't know whose boat that is."

Yet no sensible system of property would divest the original owner of title simply because the finder doesn't know who owns the item in question. Any sensible system (and the actual system under the law) would ask whether ownership is knowable through reasonable effort. As this video of the incident pretty clearly shows, the boat was in sufficiently good condition that ownership was and is very likely very easy to ascertain.

At the risk of making too much of this curious moment, I'll make three observations about the character of the president.

(1) This is further evidence that Trump's moral development was arrested when he was in grade school, where the principle finders-keepers-losers-weepers has currency.

(2) Even on the playground, finders-keepers is a principle that is favored chiefly by bullies. Suppose a child finds something of value. If the rightful owner cannot be identified, there is no occasion to invoke finders-keepers-losers-weepers. That principle only comes into play if the rightful owner identifies himself. "Hey! That's my ball." The finder responds: "Finders-keepers-losers-weepers." Anyone on the losers-weepers side of the conflict will immediately recognize the unfairness of the claim and only submit to it if in fear of violence from the finder-keeper. Trump is a bully.

(3) Trump is also Holmes's bad man. In The Path of the Law, O.W. Holmes, Jr., famously proposed:

If you want to know the law and nothing else, you must look at it as a bad man, who cares only for the material consequences which such knowledge enables him to predict, not as a good one, who finds his reasons for conduct, whether inside the law or outside of it, in the vaguer sanctions of conscience.

Suppose it really were lawful for the owner of property on which a boat washed up to keep the boat, without undertaking any inquiry into who owned the boat. A person with any conscience at all would nonetheless think he had some moral obligation to undertake such an inquiry.

Here's another way to think about that. Suppose you discovered--to your great surprise--that under the law of the state in which you live, if you find a wallet, you are legally permitted to pocket the cash and make as many credit card purchases as you can using the cards in the wallet. Still, if you found a wallet, would you not feel a moral obligation to contact the wallet's owner? That's because you, dear reader, have a conscience. Our president does not. But alas, that's hardly news.

3 comments:

In the currency of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages of moral development (after Piaget), Trump’s moral (and psychological) development is thus arrested at the “pre-conventional” level of moral reasoning (Kohlberg noted that this could be found among some adults; it is also a level that happens to be immune from Carol Gilligan’s critique), although I would hesitate to use the adjective “moral” in both cases, for it strikes me as “pre-moral” as well with regard to interpersonal communication and behavior (or folk psychological narrative). Psychologically speaking, whether we attribute this arrested moral (and emotional?) development to “narcissism in extremis” or simply pathological narcissism (‘narcissistic personality disorder’), it is associated with a cluster of well-attested behavioral manifestations and symptoms (this is not an exhaustive list): condescension and arrogance, self-aggrandizement, egregious exaggeration and habitual lying, bullying, envy, paranoia, fragile self-esteem, absence of compassion, a tendency to “dehumanize” others, racism, misogyny, “what’s in it for me” or “tit-for-tat” (or ‘you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours’) reasoning (in foreign policy terms, ‘us-v.-them’). (Incidentally, Gerald Gaus has argued, soundly and persuasively by my lights, the widely held view that iterated game theory [tit-for-tat] and evolutionary psychology [kin altruism] provide sufficient evidence for the proposition that purely instrumental reasoning is capable of securing large-scale social cooperation is profoundly mistaken.) Some psychiatrists have described Trump’s behavior in terms of “unbridled, or extreme present hedonism,” which is descriptively rich and fairly transparent in meaning.

What has increasingly interested me is what all of this says about those who continue to enthusiastically and uncritically support Trump (be they citizens or politicians), whatever class or social strata they come from. We have, it seems, a more or less authoritarian social psychological dynamic in which ideological messianism is entrenched or facilitated by the cultural “triumph of spectacle” (Chris Hedges). A cluster of apparently mutually reinforcing and deplorable beliefs and attitudes are held by individuals who are unusually (that is to say, more than the rest of us) prone or disposed to self-deception, denial, and wishful or fantasized thinking while being attracted to an authoritarian, plutocratic, and kleptocratic “daddy” who happens to suffer from narcissistic megalomania. A paranoid “politics of fear” is the (or one) result, although I confess to being afraid for rather other reasons.

Trump is the nation's raw "id" while the average person has "ego" that is weak enough to find a way to justify putting him in power even though it shouldn't take a "superego" to find a problem with this. I might have that right. Sounds good.

Seriously, to the degree he is the "bad man," blame is shared. We are trapped in a metaphorical story that has a feel of myth about it. The comment he made (also noted last night on John Oliver) has a sense of the absurd about it.

Perhaps the topic of this post could be extended to Trump Enterprises "finding" laundered monies from purchasers of Trump real estate which laundered monies reflect, perhaps, money losses of governments and even people, among other things.